“Trump is simply insanely obsessed with what happened in the last election. But now he is president, and the fact that he may not have colluded with the Russians doesn’t mean he does not, as president, have a responsibility to ensure that the Russians be punished for interfering in our last election on their own and be effectively deterred from doing so in the future.”

New York Times

“Trump is willing to publicly confront US allies on defense spending, humiliating the assembled heads of state at a NATO summit. He’s willing to hit the EU with tariffs and WTO suits over

allegedly) unfair trade practices. Yet when given a massive platform to confront Vladimir Putin over a series of very real attacks on the United States and its allies, Trump actually defended the Russian leader.”

“The [US-Russia] relationship went from very bad to very good in those four hours without Russia announcing any concessions or course correction whatsoever… While Trump stayed completely silent on the issue of Ukraine, Putin said that the conflict was an internal one for the country and that more pressure should be put on Kiev to agree on Russian terms. And the entire issue of Syria seemed to be reduced to a mutual effort to help with the security issues of Israel adjacent to the occupied Golan Heights.”

The right generally condemns Trump’s comments, but notes that, despite the rhetoric, his administration has taken a tough stance against Russia.

“A strong and prudent president would have crafted a condemnation both forceful and diplomatic about Russia’s election meddling, military aggression, and abuses of human rights and civil liberties. Trump spoke up on none of these things, thus giving Putin another win.”

“Diplomacy at the highest levels calls for restraint of words and tone. But it doesn’t call for one leader to defer to another’s leader’s views… The price for all this in the short- and medium-term… is likely to be an emboldened Putin who is willing to withstand more pain because he got out of the press conference what he wanted: deference, enhanced prestige, and thus power over his internal and external enemies.”

The Federalist

Counterpoint: Trump “never ‘attacked’ U.S. intelligence agencies, nor did he explicitly take one side over the other. He said that he trusted Putin — as he should have done, if his goal was to improve relations… far from being weak, Trump has been tougher than his predecessors toward Russia, letting his actions speak louder than his words.”

Breitbart

Many point out that “Trump’s actual policies toward Russia—from defense spending, stepped up missile defense and troop deployment in eastern Europe, to energy, to browbeating NATO to spend more on defense, to killing Russian mercenaries in Syria, etc—are much tougher and pose much more adversity for Russia than Obama’s policies, or anything Hillary Clinton might have done.”

Powerline Blog

“The panic induced by his verbiage should be tempered with the knowledge that he says a lot of stuff, and that members of his own administration ignore most of it when it comes time to implement policy. They know it, Putin knows it, and the press knows it.”